Chris Ryan, a psychiatrist, writes about the futility of risk assessment in a group of patients admitted in emergency. He shows that they are more then likely to score high on quite a number of risk factors, so it is futile to take them into account, as most of them are unlikely to take their lives. His blog, on the excellent Imperfect cognitions, is in tune with a recent paper in which he and his co-authors write in the abstract:Continue reading “Suicide – context and meaning”→

A recent article on The Conversation website has taken issue with teaching grammar. It shows up prescriptivist linguistics which takes upon itself to police the way we speak and write, castigating us for making mistakes. For example, I recently heard two young people arguing and one of them was shouting at the other: ‘I wish I went yesterday’. Of course, he should have said ‘I wish I had gone…’. That’s the grammatically correct way, as any (prescriptivist) linguist would know. Continue reading “Grammar, a great equaliser”→

It’s about 10 years ago that I decided to go to a psychiatric hospital. I wanted to know what psychiatry was like. I decided to write a book on men’s depression, read quite a lot (often I found I knew more about depression than psychiatrists I spoke to – they mostly knew dosage), but I still missed one thing. I had never been in a psychiatric hospital. And as I had been reading Szasz or Scheff, my head was full of anti-psychiatry. So, it was time to see it for myself.

Recently, I was asked by a female colleague to offer feedback on a document summarising her achievements. As I was reading the text, which is in Polish, I was struck by the fact that whenever she described herself, she used nouns in the masculine form. And so, for example, when she described herself as a researcher, she used the word badacz (masculine) and not badaczka (feminine).